Faith-Based Defiance

In 1995, one million black men — give or take a couple of hundred thousand — gathered on the National Mall in Washington. The Million Man March bested the March on Washington of 1963 in turnout but otherwise fell far short of that historic benchmark. It was a rebellion without a cause, lacking any specific political agenda, and its organizer, the notorious demagogue Louis Farrakhan, was as repellent as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspiring. Perhaps worst of all, the Million Man March announced its chauvinism in its very name, deliberately excluding half the black community.

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement has often lagged on the question of women’s equality even as it has led the nation on matters of race. Much of the blame for this must be borne by the religious institutions that have played a predominant role in the struggle for racial justice. Until recently, most black churches refused to grant women leadership roles, depriving them of the platform that so many black men have used to rally followers and challenge injustice.

Despite these affronts, black women have remained the most faithful and abiding servants of the church, and they have been among the most diligent and effective activists for racial justice. In “Jesus, Jobs, and Justice,” Bettye Collier-Thomas, a professor of history at Temple University, tells the untold stories of scores of religious and politically active black women, their organizations, informal gatherings and intellectual movements. For readers who imagine that the religious and political activism of Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Rosa Parks is exceptional, the book will be a revelation. The author details the contributions of black women to almost every important aspect of the struggle for racial justice. The book weaves its many smaller stories into the broad fabric of the black experience, beginning in the early days of slavery and covering the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights and black power movements, before arriving at today’s tense moment of renewed hope and familiar anxiety.

The progressive black women of “Jesus, Jobs, and Justice” fought for respect from the male-dominated churches in which they worked, even as they confronted the common enemy of white racism. An especially absorbing chapter describes the experiences of black women missionaries in Liberia, Congo, Nigeria and Sierra Leone during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These women overcame the resistance and paternalism of black and white church leaders who thought black women should restrict their philanthropic activities to the narrow domestic sphere, only to encounter condescending European missionaries and exploitative colonists who feared they would spread “radical ideas” of racial equality to the native population once they arrived in Africa.

The book also explores the fraught relationship between black and white feminists, who share a commitment to ­women’s equality but have clashed because many black women have seen feminism as a distraction from the struggle for racial justice and a threat to an embattled black masculinity. And it shows how chauvinistic men have exploited this concern — by the time of the Million Man March, it had proved to be little more than a cheap justification for sexism.

For the most part, Collier-Thomas writes with the cadence and detachment of the professional historian. That makes the book reassuringly authoritative, but it can also make for dense reading. A blizzard of people, places, organizations and anecdotes can be disorienting, and instead of a discrete central narrative that might keep wandering minds on course, the book contains multiple narratives and delicately interlaced themes.

Despite her academic tenor, Collier-Thomas is obviously passionate about her subject, and she occasionally editorializes. A small but telling example: In describing the Rev. James H. Cone’s controversial “black liberation theology” — which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright introduced to much of the world in the heat of the 2008 presidential contest — she writes that Cone “demonstrated how a historically accurate interpretation of the Bible leads to the conclusion that black power is a legitimate expression of the Gospel in a particular situation of oppression.” Surely a more dispassionate author would leave it to others to judge whether Cone’s argument was persuasive.

For Collier-Thomas, it’s an article of faith that religious conviction has been indispensable to the battles against racism, class exploitation and sexism: “Motivated by their deep religious convictions . . . black women worked long and hard . . . to improve the economic, social and political status of females, blacks and other minorities.” She brusquely dismisses those who question why politically progressive black women have tolerated sexist and often corrupt religious organizations as “critics, pundits and outsiders” who “often hold blacks to a higher standard than whites.”

Collier-Thomas rightly insists that the church “represents a way of life and has been at the center of black life.” But that very centrality makes obscure the role of religious faith as such in the struggle for racial justice. Because churches were the most important autonomous organizations in the black community, they were the natural places for oppositional social movements to form; in a sense, the church played the same role in the civil rights movement that the tavern and the cafe did in many European social ­movements.

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And if faith inspired the struggle against injustice, it may also have discouraged the critical posture that would have allowed people to detect and challenge malfeasance, abuse and prejudice by those in positions of religious authority. Collier-Thomas reminds us that for every courageous and self-sacrificing religious leader, like Martin Luther King Jr., there are several less altruistic figures. Consider, for instance, the misdeeds of people like Bishop William H. Hillery of the A.M.E. Zion Church, who was defrocked in 1884 after decades of embezzlement, violence, alcohol abuse and sexual transgressions, and the Rev. Henry J. Lyons of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A., who was sentenced to five years in federal prison after embezzling $4 million from his church in the 1990s, partly to support “a bevy of ­mistresses.”

Collier-Thomas also reminds us that after the Rev. Jesse Jackson carried on an extramarital affair, he shamelessly turned a church service at which he was to atone for his indiscretion into a self-­serving “media event.” (To this list of miscreants we might add the ostentatious Rev. Al Sharpton and the self-obsessed Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who, after his demagogic sermons were posted on YouTube, did his best to remain in the limelight despite the damage to Barack Obama.)

Collier-Thomas treats these and numerous other dramatic scandals as serious lapses of faith, and she frankly acknowledges many instances of religiously motivated bigotry, of which widespread antigay bias is the most conspicuous today. Still, she sees the church as a fundamentally benevolent institution that can be cured of these blemishes. But “Jesus, Jobs, and Justice” suggests a plausible counterreading: abuse of authority and unexamined prejudice are typical of the religious complexion generally — they are the dark side of faith, the price to be paid for the fortitude and selflessness that religious conviction often inspires.

The women in this book are heroic and their stories moving, but their fight for respect and authority in the churches they worked so hard to build and support evokes the melancholia of unrequited love. It’s as if only a faith strong enough to endure slavery and overcome Jim Crow could compel them to give so much to institutions that offered them so little in return.

JESUS, JOBS, AND JUSTICE

African American Women and Religion

By Bettye Collier-Thomas

Illustrated. 695 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50

Richard Thompson Ford is a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,” which is now in paperback.

A version of this review appears in print on February 7, 2010, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Faith-Based Defiance. Today's Paper|Subscribe